RHIC's Final Run Marks End of Era in Nuclear Physics Research

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory completed its final run on February 6, 2026, marking the end of a 25-year era in nuclear physics research that produced groundbreaking discoveries about the fundamental building blocks of matter.

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Record-Breaking Final Dataset The 25th and final run generated the largest-ever dataset from RHIC's most energetic head-on collisions between gold ions. The new sPHENIX detector alone accumulated more than 200 petabytes of raw data—exceeding all previous RHIC datasets combined. This massive collection includes 40 billion snapshots of quark-gluon plasma, the primordial matter that existed microseconds after the Big Bang.

Scientific Legacy RHIC's research program achieved several major milestones:

• Quark-Gluon Plasma Discovery: In 2005, RHIC physicists confirmed the existence of this nearly "perfect" liquid state of matter, flowing with extremely low viscosity
• Proton Spin Mystery: RHIC's polarized proton collisions revealed that gluons contribute about as much to proton spin as quarks do, though the complete puzzle remains unsolved
• Technological Advances: The facility pushed beyond original design specifications in collision rates, energy ranges, and ion variety

Transition to EIC Major components of RHIC will be repurposed for the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a next-generation nuclear physics facility. The EIC will use one of RHIC's ion storage rings, refurbished and paired with a new electron storage ring, to enable precision measurements of how quarks and gluons are organized within matter.

Global Impact Throughout its operation, RHIC served thousands of scientists from across the nation and around the globe. The facility's data has driven advances in supercomputing, AI methods for big data analysis, and international data sharing infrastructure. Brookhaven's data center now stores over 610 petabytes of nuclear and particle physics data.

Future Research While RHIC operations have concluded, the scientific mission continues through data analysis expected to yield discoveries for at least another decade. The final dataset will help train the next generation of physicists and serve as a bridge between lower-energy experiments at FAIR and CERN and higher-energy research at the LHC.

The RHIC program demonstrates how pushing technological limits in pursuit of fundamental science creates unexpected connections across disciplines, from quantum entanglement to condensed matter physics, while building the expertise needed for future scientific breakthroughs.